Roll Away The Stone

Summary:The gearheads are buzzing over ZDNet's report from Friday about Chris Stone (left, from ZDNet France) leaving Novell. They're worried about what this may mean concerning Novell's commitment to open source.

The gearheads are buzzing over ZDNet's report from Friday about Chris Stone (left, from ZDNet France) leaving Novell. They're worried about what this may mean concerning Novell's commitment to open source.

Stone was in his second tour with Novell, which moved to Waltham from Utah early this year.

During this second Stone tour the company was reborn as a Linux outfit, buying both Suse Linux and Ximian.

Stone was seen (rightly or wrongly) as a leader in the Linux transition (hence the buzzing). The official announcement said CEO Jack Messman (right, from Novell.Com) will take over Stone's responsibilities, which included attracting developers.

Messman himself is a strange bird to be heading a tech outfit. He actually started his career in the oilpatch (Union Pacific Resources Group)and the fact that he's management first, tech second may alsohave something to do with the wailing and gnashing of teeth.>

wailing justified? Speculation about exactly how Stone left has made the waves quite high at Novell this weekend. As they say, time will tell.

But given Novell's position within the Linux community, and Messman's original executive role in the oilpatch, it might be wise if he could pour a little oil on these troubled waters.

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994.

Disclosure

Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
At the present moment I run only a personal blog in addition to my ZDNet open source blog.
DanaBlankenhorn.Com has the subtitle The War Against Oil. In the past I have used it to write about political history, e-commerce, personal matters, some ideas related to open source, and The World of Always On, which is the idea of using sensors, motes and RFID to turn WiFi links into platforms for applications which live in the air.
My IRA account at Schwab holds a few tech shares, most notably some Intel and Applied Materials, but there are no open source companies in it. I don’t even own any CBS stock.